I decided to buy myself a DVD Writer. A quick search and I decided to get a SATA device from Samsung that has LightScribe. I have a SATA controller on my motherboard, and I don’t like the idea of buying old technology, so I wanted a SATA interface.

I did a quick check to make sure that there was a good chance such a device would work with my Ubuntu desktop system. No major issues were highlighted, so on Tuesday I went bought the drive. I guessed that it would be only a few minutes to install, and then I would be up and running.

How wrong was I? To cut a long story short, I found that I have two different SATA controllers on my motherboard. One is incorporated in the southbridge, and one extra one. If I plugged the DVD into the extra one, then the machine would not even complete the POST. If I plugged it into the one on the southbridge, it would boot, but very slowly, and the DVD would not work, and the lots of error messages would fill dmesg.

It turns out that I have an early motherboard with SATA, and that it is not very good. Eventually I gave up trying to get it to work, and just bought a new SATA controller card. Now the machine boots without errors. Next thing is to learn how to create DVD’s and see if I can get LightScribe to work.